Cultivating Q Methodology: Essays Honoring Steven R. Brown

By James C. Rhoads

Anyone interested in research related to determining subjectivities, meaning people's opinions about a topic, will be interested in reading this text. Certainly, this text is a must-have for anyone interested in Q methodology or who has used Q methodology, Q Methodology (Q) is a complete methodology which involves technique (sorting), method (factor analysis), philosophy, ontology, and epistemology. Q reveals and describes divergent views in a group as well as consensus. Q was created by William Stephenson (1902-1989) who possessed PhDs in physics (1926) and psychology (1929) and studied psychometrics with Charles Spearman, the creator of factor analysis.

Professor Steven R. Brown was a student of Stephenson at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Since 1967, he has been teaching at Kent State University, first in the Department of Political Science, until his retirement in 2011, and since then as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education. In addition to his teaching, Brown has distinguished himself as a scholar in the fields of political science, political psychology, the policy sciences, literary criticism, evaluation and measurement, experimental design, methodology, and most importantly, Q methodology. It was during his graduate school days that Brown encountered William Stephenson, who innovated Q methodology in 1935. Brown has devoted his professional life to the advancement of Stephenson's profound ideas, and along the way has made enormous contributions to Q methodology, himself. In fact, since Stephenson's passing in 1989, Professor Steven R. Brown has emerged as the foremost authority on Q methodology and its amazing utility in studying every facet of the human sciences.

This festschrift dedicated to Professor Steven R. Brown, consists of thirteen chapters authored by other experts in Q methodology within a variety of disciplines. These chapters are organized into the following three sections: Legacy (of Brown), Methodology (discussions of methodological aspects of Q), and Applications (varied applications across multiple disciplines). In addition, there is an introduction that provides a brief historical overview of Steven R. Brown's academic history and contributions to Q methodology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667809359

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Copyright ©2022 by the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-66780-934-2

eBook ISBN 978-1-66780-935-9

Steven R. Brown

Table of Contents

Foreword

Susan E. Ramlo

Introduction

Dan B. Thomas, James C. Rhoads, Susan E. Ramlo

√ LEGACY

1. William Stephenson and the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health: Lost Opportunity or Springboard for a Revitalized Career?

James M. Good

2 Cultivating in Brown’s Garden: Remarks on Q Study Topology

Michael Stricklin

3. Q Methodology and Constructivism: Some Reflections on Sincerity and Authenticity in Honour of Steve Brown

Paul Stenner

4. A Sliver of Steven Brown’s Legacy

J. David Gillespie

√ METHODOLOGY

5. The Arts, Health Literacy, Health Disparities, and Play Theory

Robert A. Logan

6. Comparative Rotations and Analyses of Q Data: A Worked Example

Robert D. Braswell

7. A Science of Subjectivity

Susan Ramlo

8. Perspectives on Q sorting

Amanda Wolf

9. The Operantcy of Popular Culture: Preserving, While Measuring, Key Informants’ Subjectivity

Dan B. Thomas, Bruce McKeown, James C. Rhoads Daniel Sundblad

√ APPLICATIONS

10. Deceptive Power of Fake News: Perception of Believability Around Visuals, News Media, Social Media, and Shared Values

Mohammad Ali , Dennis F. Kinsey

11. Q methodology and Questionnaires: From Small ‘p’ to Big ‘N’

Rachel Baker, Job van Exel

12. The Constitution in the Public Mind: Stability and Change

Larry Baas, James Paul Old, James C. Rhoads

13. Transformations in American Civil Religion: Resurrecting Rousseau’s Relevance

Bruce McKeown, Dan B. Thomas

Steve Brown Bibliography

List of Contributors

Foreword

In 1972, a festschrift for William Stephenson was published in honor of the inventor and leading protagonist of Q methodology. In the preface of that text, Science, Psychology, and Communication: Essays Honoring William Stephenson, editors Steven R. Brown and Donald J. Brenner wrote:

Although we cannot claim always to have been faithful followers, nevertheless we readily acknowledge that, in one way or another, Professor Stephenson has influenced all of us whose contributions fill these pages. As colleagues, students, and friends, we have benefited from his keen insights, have grown under his patient counsel, and have experienced the warmth and infectious vitality of his personality. These chapters are our expressions of appreciation and gratitude.

These same words are fitting for this more recent contribution in honor of our colleague and friend, Steven R. Brown. Professor Brown’s contributions to Q methodology in terms of scholarship, the science of subjectivity, the Q-METHOD list, the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity, Operant Subjectivity (the international Q journal), completed dissertations, the sharing of Q bibliographies, and so many other aspects and actions related to Q methodology that we could not hope to list them all.

The contributions of this text are grouped into three sections: Legacy, Methodology, and Applications. These categorizations are not absolute but offer the reader some guidance and the text some sense of organization. Authors self-identified their chapters within these categories as we, the editors, could see that, like factor loadings of Q-sorts on a factor, identifying chapters without participant input about their self-referent viewpoint was sometimes unclear.

The Legacy section opens our text after the biographical introduction to Professor Brown. These chapters offer a personal take on the influence of Professor Brown on the individual authors through anecdotes and long-term influence on the authors’ research and, oftentimes, academic life. The Methodological section offers a variety of methodological interpretations of Q methodology. Finally, the Application section contains a series of Q methodological studies that help specify the diversity of applications in the Q literature.

Biographical sketches for each of the chapter authors are provided immediately following Professor Brown’s bibliography. These author biographical sketches help frame who we, the authors, are as well as our connections to Steven R. Brown. In summary, authors are associates and former students of Professor Brown who have known and maintain the utmost respect for Professor Brown and his contributions to Q methodology. We have benefited from Professor Brown’s deep yet broad understanding of Q methodology as well as the scholarship of Q – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Brown’s ability to provide help regarding questions about Q and its scholarship and its technical issues has not gone unnoticed. He has provided the foundation for the modern Q society, The International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity (I4S). We are grateful to I4S for agreeing to be the publisher of this important text.

Susan E. Ramlo

Introduction:

Dan B. Thomas, James C. Rhoads, Susan E. Ramlo

Professor Steven R. Brown received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 1967, he has been teaching at Kent State University, first in the Department of Political Science, until his retirement in 2011, and since then as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education. In addition to his teaching, Brown has distinguished himself as a scholar in the fields of political science, political psychology, the policy sciences, literary criticism, evaluation and measurement, experimental design, methodology, and most importantly, Q methodology. It was during his graduate school days that Brown encountered William Stephenson, who innovated Q methodology in 1935. Brown has devoted his professional life to the advancement of Stephenson’s profound ideas, and along the way has made enormous contributions to Q methodology, himself. In fact, since Stephenson’s passing in 1989, Professor Steven R. Brown has emerged as the foremost authority on Q methodology and its amazing utility in studying every facet of the human sciences.

1967 – 1985:

Steven R. Brown—Scholar, Mentor, Friend

When I arrived at Kent State as a graduate student in the Fall of 1969, Steve Brown was beginning his third year as a faculty member in the Department of Political Science. Though he had not yet turned thirty, Professor Brown’s potential as a serious and creative scholar was on full display in a pair of articles that would appear within the year. Emotional Experiences in Political Groups: The Case of the McCarthy Phenomenon, was published in the venerable American Political Science Review (APSR). The data for this project were gathered principally by John Ellithorp for his M.A. thesis and consisted of Q-sorts supplied by supporters of Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in the wake of his failed bid to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1968. It is noteworthy that the theory serving as the basis for selecting statements in the final Q-sample was Wilford Bion’s psychodynamic account of group emotionality, a process aided by the application of Fisherian principles of experimental design as outlined by Brown’s mentor William Stephenson in The Study of Behavior.

Consistency and the Persistence of Ideology: Some Experimental Results appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly the same year, and it too bore signature elements of the scholarly craftsmanship that would come to define Brown’s published work in the half-century and some 140 publications that followed. In this case, the target was nothing less than the discipline’s conventional wisdom (as distilled by the University of Michigan’s Phillip Converse) regarding the mass-public’s alleged incapacity to navigate the complexities of political life by virtue of ideological principles. Drawing upon Robert Lane’s countervailing view in his Political Ideology, Brown fashioned a Q-sample from the commentaries of the 15 working-class men whose in-depth interviews comprised the data for Lane’s volume. Arguing that Converse had conflated the capacity to articulate ideological convictions with the ability to hold them, Brown had students in a graduate seminar solicit Q-sorts with the same Q-sample at two points in time – with the second administration varied by three lengths of intervals between administrations – from two individuals, one of whom could be designated as elite — e.g., Ph.D.’s in political science – while the other could safely be categorized as mass – e.g., non-college educated persons with no more than a passing interest in politics. Contrary to Converse, correlations between participants’ Time1 and Time2 Q-sorts were statistically significant independent of elite/mass status; furthermore, these correlations showed no erosion due to the length of time between administrations.

Contributors to this volume who were part of the same graduate-school cohort will need no reminder that the conclusion to the 1969-70 academic year – on May 4, 1970 – was both shockingly abrupt and profoundly tragic. I for one will never forget the surreal sights and sounds of ambulances screaming across the campus to pick up students wounded by shots fired by members of the Ohio National Guard. (Dr. Brown, Hugh Winebrenner and I had been eating lunch in the KSU cafeteria at the time.) Thereafter, classes were canceled, students evacuated, and the University closed until Summer Session. Brown would spend the next academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale as part of the budding politics and psychology program that attracted a veritable Who’s Who of young scholars (including John Sullivan, Donald Kinder, and George Marcus, among others) whose work would eventually define a generation’s worth of scholarship in the emerging field of political psychology. While in New Haven, Brown would revisit Bion’s work, becoming trained as a group relations consultant, under the auspices of the A. K. Rice Institute, as a result. In addition, Brown’s scholarly productivity continued apace: he completed several manuscripts based on data gathered on the public reactions to the Kent State event, in the process drawing upon while elaborating Q’s affinities with Egon Brunswik’s notion of stimulus representativeness, and R. D. Laing’s Politics of the Self and Other. In the same vein, Brown would publish the first article in the first issue of the new journal, Experimental Study of Politics, using the opportunity to demonstrate how experimental design principles could be employed in the composition of Q-samples to affect the full-fledged structuring of theory. Finally, Brown’s year at Yale allowed him to make the trip into New York City to visit with representatives from Teacher’s College Press putting the finishing touches on the Stephenson festschrift, which he co-edited with Donald Brenner, while presenting his research on reactions to Kent State at a meeting of the American Education Research Association.

Upon his return to Kent State, Brown would enter an even more productive phase of his career. His publications appearing in the nearly two decades prior to the advent of the internet – i.e., before Brown took Q online via the Q-Method listserv – were impressive in number and arguably even more so in quality. Prior to the publication of his majestic, methodologically definitive Political Subjectivity by Yale University Press in 1980, Steve authored or co-authored more than two dozen articles and chapters, breaking new ground on a variety of fronts, ranging from work on intensive analysis (featured in the first article in the first issue of Political Methodology) to the analysis of reader responses to political literature (published as his second APSR article in 1977). Particularly noteworthy with regard to intensive analysis was the piece appearing in Psychiatry (with Larry Baas in 1974) that effectively provided an empirical examination of the notion of transformations, the central but elusive psychodynamic processes symbolized by brackets (}) in Harold Lasswell’s classic developmental formula for Political Man, P = p } d } r, where p represents private motives, d signifies displacement onto the public arena, and r constitutes rationalization in terms of the public interest. The brackets, as noted, are symbols for the ways an individual, typically unconsciously, transforms the energies of the respective domains as she or he acquires a political identity (P).

Lasswell himself, then in his later years but still an associate of the Yale Law School with colleague Myres McDougal, was so impressed with this paper that he was keen to have his proteges schooled in Q-methodology. Brown would answer the call by securing an NSF grant and serving as Principal Investigator for a multi-year project bringing Q to bear in the study of the Lasswellian notion of political climate. In the process, Brown would arrange for meetings between Lasswell and his students with Stephenson himself, thereby uniting physically — if not in immediate intellectual harmony! –the pair of scholarly giants, each of whom served an important mentoring role in Brown’s own career. Eventually, poetic testimony to the deep influence of both men would be seen in the designation of Brown as the recipient of awards bearing the names of each, the Stephenson Award by the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity [ISSSS], the Lasswell Award by the International Society of Political Psychology [ISPP]. It bears mention in this connection that Brown was also a Founding Member of both ISSSS and ISPP.

Readers unfamiliar with, yet curious about, the full range of professional activities Brown assumed while still in his thirties and forties can consult the reasonably up-to-date version of his (perennially in-progress) bibliography contained in this volume. Doing so would reveal explicit details of a career still clearly embarked on a trajectory of high-energy ascendance. In addition to directing numerous dissertations while serving for several years on the Department’s Graduate Studies Committee, Brown’s reputation as a scholar was undergoing rapid extension well beyond the confines of the Kent State campus. This would be registered in the nine editorial boards of prominent journals on which Brown served in the 1970s and subsequently in overseas appointments, first in 1981 as a Fulbright scholar to Korea’s Seoul National University, followed in AY1988-89 by serving as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Education, University of Leicester in England. It was at the latter location that Brown would publish The Operantcy of Practical Criticism (with Margaret Mathieson), the third time his work appears as the first article in the first issue of a new journal, in this case the bilingual Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication. The idea of operantcy, borrowed from B. F. Skinner’s notion of operant conditioning, is considered so important as a scientific qualifier by Brown that it is used in the formal title of the journal founded by Steve – originally as The Q Methodology Newsletter in 1977 — in what would become the peer-reviewed flagship journal for research featuring allegiance to Stephenson’s career-long aspiration of developing a quantum-based science of subjectivity, today bearing the title Operant Subjectivity: The International Journal of Q Methodology. The same principle of operantcy, incidentally, that was underscored in the Brown-Mathieson piece is applied to methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of popular culture as a chapter in this volume.

Inspection of his bibliography for the decade of the 1980s will also show that Brown served a ten-year term as the Book Review Editor for Political Psychology, the official and prestigious journal of the aforementioned ISPP. A half-dozen years later, Brown was appointed to the prominent position of Executive Director of the same organization, yet that appointment, strangely, lasts for only one year. Here, I fully realize I run the risks of violating a profound professional and ethical commitment displayed by Professor Brown over his entire career – by refusing to utter a public word of complaint or grievance alleging unfair treatment at the hands of administrators – in sharing a personal communication with readers that Brown’s resignation from this post was due to departmental incompetence revealed by local authorities’ unwillingness to accommodate the time and other resource needs such a position demanded. Suffice it to close this account by saying that a handful of the essayists for this volume are aware of similar episodes in Brown’s tenure at Kent State and out of respect for his allegiance to confidentiality on sensitive matters of a similar nature — having discussed the ethics involved on occasion — have decided to defer in all other respects to the judgments and preferences of our mentor.

What examination of a bibliography cannot do justice to is in many respects equally if not important in rendering an understanding of the character and personal qualities that transcend – or underpin – Dr. Brown’s enormous contributions as a professional. Foremost among the missing materials in this Introduction so far is any mention of Brown’s marriage to Carolynn (Casey) Denison, a young widow and mom to four elementary school-aged children: three daughters and one son. Interestingly, their initial meeting occurred as a dividend of Brown’s group relations work upon his return from Yale. Casey had enrolled as a student in one of Brown’s earliest group conferences for which he served as a consultant and their acquaintance quickly evolved into a dating relationship. In retrospect, the blossoming of this relationship into a full-fledged romance may have been aided and abetted by efforts of my wife then, a teaching colleague of Casey’s who enjoyed playing the role of cupid. I was honored to serve as best man in the small wedding ceremony attended by family and friends in the summer of 1973. In less than two years, God willing, Steve and Casey will celebrate a half-century of wedded life. For the better part of the past two decades of their marriage, Steve and Casey have served as adoptive parents for their great-granddaughter Lexi, whose maturation as a young lady has been a joy to witness by regular attendees at I4S Conferences the world over.

Finally, I would be remiss to conclude without mention of the huge debt of gratitude I personally owe to both Steve and Casey as friends. Both are blessed with a great sense of humor, and their home has always been open to me and my family – and on occasion to a class of undergrads in tow en route from Iowa to DC for three weeks of May Term. Especially noteworthy among the many other occasions were the three summers spanning 2003 to 2005 when the Brown home on Woodbend Avenue would serve as a sanctuary for my late wife then battling brain cancer amid a host of other life-threatening demons as well. (Casey had arranged for body-based treatments for Kathy through the clinic in which she worked as a psychotherapist prior to retirement.) The Browns excel at cultivating subjectivity and their skill in this regard is a treasure that many contributors to this festschrift, whether former graduate students of Steve’s or not, know firsthand. While my own memory is clearly not what it used to be, it is easy to recall the joyous times shared with the Browns and their dear friends, the Griffiths, on the screened-in porch attached to the Woodbend abode. Replete with a few glasses of wine, supplemented by some of the best-tasting vegetarian pizza imaginable — from the local Italian pizzerias of Ravenna, Ohio – the Friday evening seminars provided the perfect setting for the laughter-laden, soul-enhancing regression in the service of the ego playfulness that has, alas, been missing from our collective life due to the Covid pandemic. Here’s hoping that this long-overdue tribute will mark a genuine step to reclaim those shared experiences.

Dan B. Thomas

1986 – 2003:

Steven R. Brown — An Exemplary Educator

I first met Steve Brown as a prospective graduate student in the Department of Political Science at Kent State University in the late spring of 1986. Professor Brown was, at that time, Director of Graduate Studies for the Department. After that brief meeting, I was reassured that Kent was the place for me. I enrolled in Brown’s summer seminar in political psychology and was fascinated. In the fall of 1986, all first year graduate students were enrolled in a statistics course that was daunting to me and most of my colleagues who had no prior training in statistics. Though taught by another faculty member in the Department, Professor Brown held a weekly review session for the lot of us who felt we needed review. I remember leaving those reviews wishing Brown was teaching the course. That was my initial exposure to Professor Brown’s lifetime commitment to his students. My graduate career, indeed my professional career, was and has been filled with many more examples of Professor Brown’s generous approach to the educational and intellectual development of his students.

By the mid-1980s, Brown was in mid-career and already a prolific scholar. Fresh off the success of his important book published by Yale University Press, Political Subjectivity: Applications of Q Methodology in Political Science, Brown had numerous articles, book chapters and a co-written SAGE monograph published in the succeeding years. A review of Brown’s lengthy curriculum vitae shows, in addition to the SAGE monograph, 1 co-edited journal issue, 8 book chapters, 47 refereed articles, and 59 conference presentations, in just the 1986-2003 period. Not only is the sheer output remarkable, but so too is the breadth of topics covered from methodological issues, political psychology, quantum physics and Q methodology, decision-making, the policy sciences, Q methodology and qualitative research, political attitudes, etc. Brown also served as editor of the journal Policy Sciences, and on the editorial boards of 5 other journals during the period. He was a founding member of both the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity (1989) and the Society for the Policy Sciences (1996), during this time. Brown served as Executive Director of the International Society of Political Psychology (1997-1998) and has managed the Q-Method listserv at Kent State University since 1991.

Although Brown has often given attention to the history and principles of Q methodology, as well as the procedural steps required to conduct a study on Q methodological grounds, the 1986 chapter that he authored for Berry and Lewis-Beck’s 1986 book, New Tools for Social Scientists: Advances and Applications in Research Methods, is notable in that in its roughly 20 pages, the chapter lays out an introduction to the methodology accompanied by examples that bring clarity to students of the methodology. Even in the relatively short treatment, Brown moves from fundamental issues involving the use of Q to more sophisticated issues, e.g., the rationale for using centroid factor analysis. In short, it is an elegant piece that should be revisited. As I teach an Introduction to Q methodology class to undergraduates, it is essential reading in the course. My hope is that by the end of the semester, students have a working understanding of the concepts covered.

The 1990 article, The Operantcy of Practical Criticism, that Brown co-authored with Margaret Mathieson of the University of Leicester is of particular note. The Brown-Mathieson paper demonstrates that Q can provide an answer to the question I.A. Richards aimed to solve in the 1920s regarding achieving critical discernment in poetic interpretations. More broadly, of course, the Brown-Mathieson article provided another example of Q’s power to model audience response to a stimulus. This article, along with some of Stephenson’s on this topic, has led me to an interest in applying Q methodology to the study of popular culture, which parenthetically has led me and a few close colleagues, to a field of scholars resistant to what they see as the intrusion of mathematics in the area of popular culture studies (which is a focus of one of the chapters in this book). However, the field of applying Q to the areas of audience response is growing and has been making breakthroughs.

The SAGE monograph, Experimental Design and Analysis (1990), co-authored by Brown and Lawrence E. Melamed, is demonstrative of Brown’s versatility as a researcher and his statistical acumen. Although this book is not about Q methodology, some of the topics covered certainly have relevance (e.g., Fisherian design); its description of experimental design and different statistical techniques to employ is sophisticated. The monograph further reinforces that not only is Brown an authoritative voice on the principles and processes of Q methodology, but his expertise also extends to the statistical underpinnings.

Many of Brown’s writings during the 1986-2003 period involve decision-making and his work within the policy sciences. An example is the 1993 article with Gargan, ’What is to be done?’ Anticipating the future and mobilizing prudence, published in the journal Policy Sciences. The article demonstrates the power of Q to clarify perspectives that can then be brought to bear to help bring about solutions to problems, specifically in this instance a non-profit agency charged with implementing a federal program on the local level. Brown and Gargan use Nominal Group Technique to elicit statements from agency members and then form a Q-sample of those statements to present to members. The Q study revealed points of divergence and agreement to the agency members.

I could go on pointing readers to important writings by Brown during this very productive period in his academic life, but I hope this sampling is indicative of the breadth and depth of his scholarly output. Singling out writings by Brown is akin to choosing among your favorite Beatles songs. There are many to choose from and depending on your interests and mood at the moment, some rather than others might come to mind first. But like the Fab Four, you know that you will appreciate and grasp something new each time you revisit the material.

I had the privilege of having Steve Brown direct my dissertation. It involved applying Q methodology to the study of the authoritarian personality, a topic that may actually have more relevance now than even then. Brown was a constant source of information and encouragement during that process. I traveled with him to Yale University to attend the Policy Sciences Institute conference, and while on that trip had occasion to meet with Professor Daniel Levinson, a prominent psychologist and member of the Adorno group, at the Levinson home. At first, Professor Levinson was guarded as he no doubt thought I was one in a long-history of graduate students who came to take shots at his research. Once he was convinced that I was supportive of the general thrust of their work, especially that of his colleague, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, he relaxed, and we had a meaningful conversation that was helpful to me in my work. Had it not been for Professor Brown’s encouragement that I contact Professor Levinson, that meeting would never have occurred. Having mentored so many students in Q methodology, Brown is aware that some of the more complex aspects come more slowly to even the most dedicated students. He encouraged me to bring the quantum connection into my dissertation. I didn’t feel comfortable enough to do that in those days, but over time I have come to appreciate that it is among the most significant aspects of Q. I raise this only to point out that Professor Brown is there to guide you through your maturation with the methodology. I count among my blessings that I was able to secure an academic position at Westminster College, a mere hour or so from Kent State University. Steve Brown and I continue to meet once every few months at a coffee shop in Warren, Ohio to discuss all things Q. I echo Dan Thomas’s characterization of Steve Brown – I too consider him a scholar, mentor and friend. I also consider his wife Casey to be a friend, as she has on many occasions welcomed me into their home. And, it has been a treat to watch their daughter Lexi grow up and the warm relationship the Browns have with each other. I look back at that fateful spring day in 1986, when I first met Steve Brown and though I didn’t know it at the time, my life would take a trajectory that makes me grateful, proud, and happy.

James C. Rhoads

2004—Present: Coffee and Q

By 2004, Steven R. Brown’s years as a Professor of Political Science at Kent State University were well into their last decade. Brown would retire as professor emeritus of Political Science in 2011. However, his teaching continued at Kent State within Evaluation and Measurement, within the School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration, within the College of Education, Health and Human Services at Kent State University. Within this role, Brown continues to teach the semester long Q methodology course as well as the summer Q workshop. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown hosted regular Q gatherings [Q Fortnightly Klatch] on the campus of Kent State University.

In addition, by 2004, Brown was well established as the international authority on Q methodology. He had given up the editorship of Operant Subjectivity, which he began in 1977 as the inaugural editor, yet he still operated as the managing editor, mailing hardcopies out from a local Kent printing company to the international membership of I4S (finally transferring those duties to another in 2010). Brown ended his editorship of Policy Sciences in 2004 yet remains on the editorial board. He also remains on the editorial boards of Operant Subjectivity, Journal of Scientific Psychology, and The Global: A Journal of Policy & Strategy. Brown authored or co-authored 11 book chapters related to Q methodology from 2004 onward and there is no doubt that productivity will continue. Similarly, between 2004 and 2019, Brown published 13 articles in peer reviewed journals not including the 12 articles published in Operant Subjectivity. Importantly, some of these articles attempt to combat misinformation about Q methodology. With 63 conference presentations and workshops provided between 2004 and 2019, there is no doubt his publications will continue as well. Brown also continues to advise dissertation students around the globe.

Additionally, Brown continues to manage the QMETHOD list-serv, which serves over a thousand Q methodologists at various stages of their Q experiences. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Essex, England, during the summers of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Brown continues to be invited to give workshops and master classes on Q methodology around the world, most recently in Brazil (although the COVID19 pandemic led that presentation to be virtual).

In July 2009, Brown was the recipient of the Harold Lasswell Award for a lifetime of scientific contributions, given by the International Society of Political Psychology [ISPP]. Slightly more than a year later, Brown was again recognized for his contributions – this time by the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity (I4S) – as the first recipient of the William Stephenson Award. Like the Harold Lasswell Award, the William Stephenson Award was one that recognized a lifetime of significant contributions to the study of Q methodology.

On a personal note, I was lucky enough to travel back to Ohio from Vancouver, BC with Steve Brown, from the 2005 I4S conference. Our same flights weren’t something planned but it was incredibly fortunate. It was only my second Q conference and I had presented a study where I had a single-factor solution. Steve and my conversation on the flights to Houston and subsequently to Cleveland changed how I approached the factor analytic stage of Q methodology. He convinced me to embrace centroid extraction and hand-rotation… or at least to give it a try. He also convinced me to think more about concourse and the selection of the Q-sample. Since that time, we have met for coffee on a fairly regular schedule, except for the pandemic, and our discussions are always delightful whether they are about family, Q, quantum physics, or something else. As a Q community (Q-munity), we should all feel eternally grateful for Steve’s guidance and insight.

Susan E. Ramlo

√ LEGACY

METHODOLOGY

APPLICATIONS

1

William Stephenson and the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health: Lost Opportunity or

Springboard for a Revitalized Career?

James M. Good

Introduction

Over the past twenty years I have presented numerous conference papers on various aspects